This paper studies the relation between execution and verification. A simple imperative language with execution and verification commands is introduced. A machine only executes execution commands of a program, while the compiler only performs the verification commands. Common commands in other languages can be defined as a combination of execution and verification commands. Design of verifiers ...

The process of verifying that a program conforms to its specification is often hampered by errors in both the program and the specification. A runtime checker that can evaluate formal specifications can be useful for quickly identifying such errors. This paper describes our preliminary experience with incorporating run-time checking into the Jahob verification system and discusses some lessons ...

This paper introduces the application of trail-based heuristics for software verification. Trail-directed program verification serves the purpose of shortening an error trail, so that it will be more comprehensible for the user. We explain the concept of two heuristics that are based on the Hammingand FSM-distance between states of a Java program. We then utilize the Java software verifier JPF ...

We show how properties of an interesting class of imperative programs can be verifed by means of relational modelling and symbolic computation.

Plover is an automated property-verifier for Haskell programs that has been under development for the past three years as a component of the Programatica project. In Programatica, predicate definitions and property assertions written in P-logic, a programming logic for Haskell, can be embedded in the text of a Haskell program module. Properties refine the type system of Haskell but cannot be ve...

Recent progress in automated formal verification is to a large degree due to the development of constraint languages that are sufficiently light-weight for reasoning but still expressive enough to prove properties of programs. Satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solvers implement efficient decision procedures, but offer little direct support for adapting the constraint language to the task at ...

Every programming language should have a formal semantics, and sound verification tools. Giving an operational semantics is hardly more difficult than writing an interpreter, but traditional approaches to enabling program verification, such as defining and proving sound an axiomatic semantics, require considerably more sophistication. For maximum confidence, a program verification tool should b...

Tokeneer is a small-sized (10 kloc) security system which was formally developed and verified by Praxis at the request of NSA, using SPARK technology. Since its open-source release in 2008, only two problems were found, one by static analysis, one by code review. In this paper, we report on experiments where we systematically applied various static analysis tools (compiler, bug-finder, proof to...

These notes outline a formal method for program verification of numerical computation. It forms the basis of the software package VPC in its initial phase of development. Much of the style of presentation is in the form of notes that outline the definitions and rules upon which VPC is based. The initial motivation of this project was to address some practical issues of computation, especially o...

HOL-UNITY is an implementation of Chandy and Misra's UNITY theory in the HOL88 and HOL90 theorem provers. This paper shows how to verify safety and progress properties of concurrent programs using HOL-UNITY. As an example it is proved that a lift-control program satisses a given progress property. The proof is compositional and partly automated. The progress property is decomposed into basic sa...